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II. Books for the Specialist Donelan, James H. Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xvi, 216 pp. ISBN 978-0-52 1-8876 1-8 (hardback): $99.
The year of their birth - 1770 - is not the only common thread that links Beethoven to the poets Friedrich Hölderlin and William Wordsworth and the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. This unlikely quartet also contributed to the aesthetic concept of selfconsciousness in music that became a hallmark of early Romanticism, when music rose in cultural status as the "ideal expression...